Take John Mayer's CD Room for Squares out of the case, and you'll see a boy with pouty lips and untamed hair staring up at you from the empty tray. It could well be Mayer's six-year-old alter ago: "the purest little part of me," he says in one lyric. A young performer on a major label, like an organ grinder's monkey, is a cute spectacle. But Mayer—at 24, a sophisticated guitarist and songwriter with a contagiously enthusiastic pop audience—is something more compelling: a prodigy whose talent pushes the limits of his short career. "I like to think the best of me is still hiding up my sleeve," Mayer sings on the album. If that's true, music lovers are going to be happy, not just with this release but with those to follow.
Mayer began taking guitar lessons when he was 13, quickly grasping the pentatonic scale, which he calls "the Swiss army knife" of his style. When his parents discovered he was playing by ear and not reading music, the lessons stopped. But Mayer already had the basic tools and the determination. He calls his early dedication to guitar "the thing I'm most proud of in my life...being the age I was and not having anyone tell me to do it—and having more people than not tell me to stop. I'd come home [from school], take a nap, and then play all night." Never losing sight of his blues-scale signpost, and taking his cue from diverse musicians (including Stevie Ray Vaughan, Jimi Hendrix, and Charlie Hunter), Mayer extrapolated a blues/jazz/pop technique of his own, based heavily on wrapping his thumb around the neck to fret bass notes on the E string and, eventually, the A string.
In 1997 Mayer enrolled at Berklee College of Music. Though he intended to become "a guitar virtuoso," a new insight caused him to change course. "I started to realize that I wasn't expressing myself at all in playing the same thing everyone else was playing and trying to do it faster," he recalls. Resolving to reach audiences emotionally rather than to outdo other musicians, he left Berklee in 1998 and moved to Atlanta, where his acoustic performances quickly caught the Southeast's ear. In 1999 he released a nine-track CD, Inside Wants Out, featuring dynamic acoustic riffs overlaid with smoky vocal melodies.
Room for Squares, originally released by Aware Records last May, was rereleased (with remixed tracks, a new design, and an additional song) by Aware/Columbia in September. The album, which includes new versions of several tracks from Inside Wants Out, offers a snapshot of where Mayer has been and a glimpse of where he's going. Though several tracks begin with acoustic riffs, they quickly widen to include electric guitar, Hammond organ, or Wurlitzer, as well as drums and bass. Mayer intends to continue exploring richer instrumentation. Though playing acoustically has helped him reach audiences as a solo performer, he says his ultimate goal is to "find the sweetest spot on the electric guitar."
Since Mayer thinks of his musical apogee as a sound he has yet to fully develop, it's hard to categorize him. But resistance to summation is part of what makes Mayer a prodigy—unfinished by definition. Like the cover photo of the new Room for Squares, in which Mayer's image extends across the adjacent squares of a grid, the musical borders of the album are less limits than invitations to cross over.
The album's title pays tribute to that concept. Appropriately, it came from applying an inclusive—arguably, pop—mentality to the title of Hank Mobley's Blue Note classic No Room for Squares. Throw in the idea, which Mayer adapted from Stevie Ray Vaughan, that music embraces an infinite number of styles and artists. The resulting mindset is not just musically richer; it's also more fun. "Let's sing along to the radio," says Mayer. "And then we'll go home and listen to McCoy Tyner playing piano. There's room for it all."
John Mayer chose his Dave Matthews Signature Series Martin acoustic guitar when he stopped worrying about comparisons between himself and Matthews (whose work, he admits, "completely inspires" him). Mayer's main electric guitar is a Novax Custom Expression with a fanned-fret design. The treble scale is shorter than the bass scale, yielding much better intonation, especially for dropped-D and dropped-C tunings. Mayer uses Fishman Natural I pickups and D'Addario EJ16 light-gauge, phosphor-bronze strings on his acoustic.
On stage, Mayer swears by his Avalon U5 preamp/direct box for his acoustic guitar and a Fender Vibro-King amp and Marshall Bluesbreaker distortion pedal (ca. 1993). His main vocal mic is a Neumann KMS 105. "The windscreen is so far from the capsule that I can get right up on it," Mayer says. "I'm one of those singers who doesn't feel like he's singing unless his lips are on the mic at all times."
